Still falling Poems

"I don't know/ how we keep living in a world/ that never explains why," Grotz (Window Left Open) writes in her ruminative and beautifully crafted fourth collection. Navigating love, grief, and the various losses one faces in a life, Grotz considers how "The mind won't stop minding" as she delves into the intricate and intimate parts of the attentive self that witnesses "the stillness, the windless calm" and the "heartbreak indigo." The poet finds solace even in the midst of confusion or the aftermath of loss. "A walk is a poem," Grotz offers, "So is a grief." Elsewhere, she writes beautifully on being depressed, asserting "I wasn't indifferent, I was sinking./ I stared at nothing and heard my voice say,// just wait a little longer. I didn't know/ which was me--the urging or the sinking." "Earth's the right place for love," she declares at the end of "In Sicily." Bestowing many moving and lyrical insights, this deserves to be read slowly and compassionately. (May)

Director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Grotz (Window Left Open) offers free verse with scatterings of alliteration and rhyme in her affecting new collection. She notes in an interview that her poems begin when "something in the world catches my eye"; then she hears a piece of music or an interior voice and combines all of these elements to create a kind of patchwork poetry. Many of the best poems in this patchwork contain biblical allusions, with one of the best, "The Conversion of Paul," connecting Paul's epiphany on the road to Damascus with the death of a close friend named Paul. (A stunning close-up of Caravaggio's painting on the subject is reproduced on the book's cover.) Another poem references the Bible's well-known observation about the Virgin Mary: "She kept all These Things and Pondered Them in Her Heart," but here Grotz is the one pondering the loss of a loved one. In fact, loss figures largely in this collection, including, evidently, the loss of a mother. VERDICT Coming from deep inside, these poems work by free association, often alluding to falling rain, snow, and even sunlight pouring onto a surface, all of which add a spiritual resonance to these hypnotic and meditative poems.--Diane Scharper